fustian

fustian /FUS-chən/. adjective or noun. A pompous, bombastic style of writing or speaking. Also, a coarse family of twilled fabric that includes moleskin, velveteen and corduroy. From Old French fustaigne, from Medieval Latin fustaneum (staff, stick, cudgel), a loaned translation of Greek xulinos (made of cotton).

“He could remember how he had once stood on the heath and put that same brass telescope to his eye and seen a man in white fustian on the gallows at Dorchester.” (Virginia Woolf)

“Yashar Kemal’s most recently translated novel comes through the language barrier disconcertingly like a sword-and-sorcery romance. Not only the style, with its magic touch of fustian (‘I am Gazele, the gazelle-eyed, take my eyes, they are yours’) but the content suggests a picturesque never-never world.” (Angela Carter)

“Betjeman stuck with the more fustian [publishing] house of John Murray because, as a cultural conservationist dedicated to the preservation of a vanishing England, he didn’t want his books to look modern at all. He didn’t want a front cover showing nothing but a typeface: he wanted little drawings of herbaceous festoons and time-honoured architectural doodahs…” (Clive James)

“Although Burton disclaims “big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Alcestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit … elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies etc. which many so much affect,” he employs all of these devices in a great phantasmagoria of prose. It is an opéra bou fe of paraphrase and quotation…” (Peter Ackroyd)

“If ever there was a mind that was woolly and convoluted, it’s his! He’s what an earlier generation was wont to call a trader in fustian. And the things he says are made even more displeasing by the way he speaks.” (Marcel Proust, trans. by James Grieve)

“They flounder about between fustian in expression, and bathos in sentiment.” (William Hazlitt)

“Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet, though his bones lay in an anonymous grave beyond the seas, to soften the arrogant gesture with which they had said him farewell” (William Faulkner)

“Flann O’Brien not only mimics the salient features and fustian of heroic Gaelic tales but supersedes them, suggesting to the reader that this, his Finn, is more splendidly gigantic and mythically outrageous than the storied original.” (William Gass)

“Sophie turned the radio on and from WQXR the sound of the overture to Russlan and Ludmilla blared forth. It was the sort of romantic fustian we both barely tolerated, but she let it play; the hoofbeats of the Tartar kettledrums began thudding through the room.” (William Styron)